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The IEA’s Renewables 2017 market report was launched in London in early October. The document, which had been called Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report until last year, is published annually and forecasts market development in renewable electricity over the next five years (2017 to 2022). Considering that renewable markets are closely linked and politicians are increasingly looking for cross-sector solutions, we have compiled the IEA’s most important conclusions regarding renewable electricity in this news article. A lack of data on renewable heating and cooling (RHC) means that the IEA does not provide a separate RHC forecast, but instead uses the World Energy Model results published in the annual World Energy Outlook.

On 18 October 2017, speakers from three continents joined a webinar initiated by the World Bank and the Clean Technology Fund and hosted by Spanish-based consultancy ATA Insights to talk about opportunities for concentrating solar thermal in industry. Martin Haagen from Industrial Solar, a German-based Fresnel collector manufacturer, analysed solar heat in industry at the macro-level. Rodrigo Mancilla, Executive Director of the Chilean Economic Development Agency, CORFO, gave his thoughts on solar heat in mining, and Eyas Al-Zadjali, Project Development Manager at Glasspoint based in Oman, spoke about the ongoing construction work for Miraah, a plant to generate solar steam for enhanced oil recovery. Additionally, opinion polls during the event asked, for example, what the around 270 participants thought was the best public support mechanism to kick-start concentrating solar thermal deployment (see the screenshot above).

A tender for 94.5 USD/MWhel in Dubai and an R&D initiative called SunShot in the United States have shown how the cost of concentrated solar power (CSP) could be lowered at a steady pace thanks to economies of scale and optimised manufacturing and operation. Though the solar power market has been the driver for most of these developments, their outcomes are likewise relevant to solar thermal, where concentrating technologies have been used to provide heating or cooling for industrial processes. Two recent webinars organised by Spanish-based consultancy ATA Insights and focused on CSP in the MENA region and Chile had developers and researchers discuss the main drivers for cost cutting and the technology outlook in the short and medium term. The chart illustrates the SunShot aim to bring down the cost of parabolic trough collectors from around 200 USD/m² to 75 USD/m².

Three years after the International Renewable Energy Agency underlined in its June 2014 Renewable Energy in Manufacturing study the great potential for using renewables in industry, the International Energy Agency has published a comprehensive report on the same topic. It is titled Fostering renewable energy integration in the industry and consists of several documents divided into two parts: a review of 21 case studies on renewable systems integrated into industrial processes and a policy section identifying eight issues which may attract or deter industrial stakeholders intending to deploy renewable production assets at their facilities. Commissioned by the IEA Renewable Energy Technology Deployment Program (IEA-RETD), the publication was lead-authored by French-based ENEA Consulting. It is one of the milestones towards an IEA Insights Paper on Renewables in Industry planned to come out in November 2017.

One year after the relaunch of the tax credit scheme for solar thermal systems in February 2016 (Law 20.897), some preliminary figures show a small increase of Chile’s solar market. But although the subsidy for newbuilds will be in effect until 2020, industry representatives have not been particularly satisfied with the impact of the new legal framework. Their criticism was supported by the fact that the announced subsidy scheme for social housing projects and low-income families has yet to be implemented. The market has improved slightly, but is moving at only half throttle. The photo shows the Villa Verde houses in the coastal city of Constitución. Some of the units which are part of this housing project have a thermosiphon system installed on the roof.

Expo Frio Calor Chile 2018 will take place in Santiago de Chile from 16 to 18 May 2018. The event will show products and services for the air conditioning and refrigeration industry and will give an update about new and alternative energies, sustainability, energy efficiency and the reduction of the environmental impact.

Arcon-Sunmark has announced the completion of a second solar-heated copper mine project. In September 2016, the Danish company installed a 6,270 m² collector field (4.4 MWth) at La Parreña in central Mexico. A 30 September press release said that the solar field would cover 58 % of the mine’s demand for heat. The field consists of 456 components of nearly 14 m² each and a storage tank of 660 m³. The first project of its kind, a field of 39,300 m² (27.5 MWth), was completed with a joint-venture partner at the Gabriela Mistral mine in Chile in 2013. Being the world’s largest solar system for process heat application, it had produced 142,000 MWh in the first 35 months of operation, the press release said. This corresponds to a specific yield of 1,112 kWh per m² and year.

Pampa Elvira Solar (PES) operates the largest solar process heat installation worldwide, a 27.5 MWth collector field at the Gabriela Mistral mine in Chile. “It´s an every-day, every-hour struggle to harvest the sun and earn our wages, so we may continue the very humble – and much too often neglected – business of running a solar heat-delivering system in the middle of the desert,” said Ian Nelson, General Manager of Pampa Elvira Solar. Solarthermalworld.org spoke with him about dust problems, the opportunities of concentrating collectors, the challenges of ESCO operation and improved copper cathodes. Five-and-a-half years ago, the engineer started at Energía Llaima, an independent producer of hydro and solar thermal solutions. PES, which was founded in 2012, is a consortium of Danish company Arcon-Sunmark and Energía Llaima.

The world’s largest process heat installation has recently completed its third year of operation. The 39,000 m² collector field, which went online in October 2013 at Codelco´s Gabriela Mistral mine, is located 100 kilometres south of the town of Calama in Chile´s high central desert. Planning, delivery and installation of the solar field were done by Chilean-Danish joint-venture Pampa Elvira Solar, which has since been the operator of the system as well. The plant provides around 80 % of the energy required for the last step in copper production, the electrolytic refining of the metal in an acid bath. Solarthermalworld.org spoke with Roberto Roman, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematical Sciences of the University of Chile. Roman has been part of a university team advising Codelco, Chile´s state-owned mining company, on solar mining from the very beginning.